29
When the stars fade, August and I dress in white.
I don my leg, a short skirt I can move easily in, and a cropped tank top.
Three green feathers grace my hair. Abuela’s necklace lays on my chest like armor.
My obsidian shard is tucked into the waistband of my skirt, cool and flat against my skin. I clutch my golden spear.
Quetzals circle over August’s house and mine. Too many to count. They cry as we leave.
Aymes wears shorts. A long-sleeved tee. Bare feet. Torsten’s former sword in hand.
We walk down the sand path that leads from the oikos, cross the wide expanse of sand, and start to climb. Niall falls into step with us. He gives me a weary, nervous look.
Then Koda joins us, having no trouble walking on his own or keeping our pace. Elias jogs to meet us. Then Ulani and Vailea catch up. Finally, near the top, Tae and Hazi come.
Our allies. Our friends.
“These birds are insane,” Elias notes, looking back as the quetzals swoop and cry overhead. He doesn’t know they don’t belong here.
They don’t belong in Abuela’s garden either, but someplace green and lush and damp where they can perch and sing and thrive. But they’re drawn to her. And now, they’re drawn to me. Is this Mamá’s reply? That she can’t come or open a door, but that she’s watching?
If she’s able to help during the trial, will she?
The quetzals fly with us to the hilltop, but they don’t enter the temple when we do. From inside, I hear their calls. The sun throws their shadows across the pale banners.
The other allied group waits near the portal staircase with Ares, Hermes, and Morrigan. I cut a glance at Niall but can’t read his reaction to her presence.
This heavy, unjust moment presses down on us all.
A phantom wind billows the god of war’s blood red cape as he stands tall and proud, looking us all over with thinly veiled contempt.
His long hair is tied back at his nape, revealing harsh features.
His sapphire armor gleams when the swaths of white fabric ringing the temple sway and the first rays of sunlight pierce the room.
“Welcome to your final trial,” his voice booms in the stillness. “All mortals who survive it and have garnered champions before the laurel crown is laid on the winner’s head will progress to the games.”
Before the laurel lands… That’s the end of the final trial, and potentially, our lives.
Ares smirks pointedly at August and me.
I imagine taking the spear and shoving it into his mouth, then pushing it out the back of his skull. It wouldn’t kill him, but it would certainly piss him off, and that alone might be worth it.
If we don’t survive this, and if none of the divine is brave enough to champion us, I might try it before we’re made to “forfeit.” At least my last moment would be spent on something meaningful.
At some point after we left the feast last night, the gods must have given the laurel to Torsten. It gleams golden on his brow, a contrast to his new silver-plated leathers.
Hermes gestures to the Norseman. “I’ll take the laurel.”
Torsten peels it from his head and smirks. “For now.”
“If the pair of them survive, why shouldn’t they be allowed to participate in the games? What would it hurt?” Morrigan asks Ares.
He crosses his arms and sharply replies, “A mortal without a champion would die.”
“Then the rule about forfeiture serves no purpose beyond your own.” Her words are barbed. Venomous. And they strike true. “If contestants will be advantaged with a champion, the games will naturally sort this all out.”
Ares smiles and shakes his head. “You insisted on being here this morning just to make a final plea on their behalf? Don’t you have more important matters to worry about?”
Morrigan’s midnight eyes meet mine. “There is a rumor spreading that you threatened any god who would champion them. If that’s the case, your behavior isn’t just dishonorable, Ares, it’s pathetic.”
Ares prowls close to her, towering over the goddess, who doesn’t shrink at all.
His eyes flash to August and me. “I’ll tell you what. If they win the trial today. If they enter the arena first, and together, I’ll waive the forfeiture rule.”
Morrigan appears satisfied. “Very well.”
It’s something. And it’s all she can give us. What happens now will be our doing, or our undoing. Her dark stare cuts to me before she disappears in a cloud of night. A reminder and a promise.
Be ruthless without hesitation.
And… even if I fall, Abuela and Cillian will be protected.
Hermes gestures to the portal. “Let the final trial begin.”
We push toward the opalescent, glimmering gold. August and I clasp hands as we take the stairs.
My heart thunders. My head tries to tell me this can’t really be happening. The moment is surreal. But my spear is warm in my hand, three feathers brush my shoulders, and there’s a gorgeous, incredible ally at my side, holding a broadsword and ready to fight alongside me like he promised.
Ulani and Vailea allow us to go in front of them.
We enter the gold and step into the last place I expect.
It’s arid and hot. The sun burns directly overhead, and standing sentinel beside the dirt road my feet know by heart, are saguaro cacti. “You wanted to see them, right?” I beam.
August’s mouth falls open at the sight. “They’re beautiful.”
“That’s my grandmother’s house.” I point to the modest adobe home in the distance. My excitement fades. I hoped to share this with him at some point, but I don’t know why we’re here in this trial.
We jog past acacias, yucca, and agave. Prickly pear in bloom. “Where’s everyone else?” August wonders, his steps lagging as I tug him along.
“I don’t know.” The courtyard gate is latched. I push it open and drag August into the yard.
I smell… pozole. Abuela’s mouthwatering hominy soup. I smell the pork shoulder and red chiles.
My grandmother’s bright door is open. Sunlight spills on the terracotta tile, warmly welcoming me home.
I take two steps into the house and gasp, clutching my heart. Because I hear her. “Carina!”
This makes no sense, but I can’t help it. I run toward the kitchen.
Shimmering like a prism, my sister ground pepper for the soup. A knot forms in my throat. I notice her dress. How she’d styled her hair. I smell the spicy scent of her perfume as she moves around the room.
I look at August. “Do you see her?”
He nods. “I see her and see through her.”
As Abuela stirred the ground peppercorns into the pozole, Carina set the table. “Are you coming to eat with us, Cal?” she yelled to me.
I mouth the word No in time with my past answer to her.
I’d been lying in bed. In addition to penning conscriptions during my convalescence, Morrigan had given me a schedule, solely focused on getting me out of my head and up and moving.
On that day, I’d done fine on the morning walk and even managed a short jog, but when I tried to run, I ate the desert dust. My pride, and hope, were scuffed, to say the least.
“Come on,” she begged. “I’m running in to work for a little while, but I want to see you before I go.”
“I’m not hungry!” I yelled from my bedroom.
“Why do you have to go in so late in the day? I thought you took the day off,” Abuela asked.
Abuela’s version of lowering her voice is whisper yelling, which meant I could hear every word and Carina knew it.
My sister placed two glasses of water on the table. “A very wise woman once told me that sometimes you have to do what you must.”
August reaches out to grip my arm as a sob tears from my throat.
It’s the single piece of advice Hermes offered us all at the start of these horrid trials, and he’d taken it from her. I heard her say it, but in the past months, I’d forgotten.
The two ate in silence, broken only by the snap of a tostada or occasional clang of spoon against bowl. Until Abuela pushed to know what was so pressing at work.
Carina assured her it was nothing to worry about. She said she wouldn’t be gone long, and Abuela dropped the matter.
When they were finished eating, our grandmother cleaned up while Carina ladled soup into a bowl for me and placed it on a tray with two crackers, a spoon, and a glass of water, then carried it down the hall.
I cry as she walks past me and August.
She had that look in her eye. Determination and a gods damned inferno as she shouldered my door open.
August and I follow her, watching from the doorway.
She set the tray down on the small table beside my bed. The mattress sank as she sat next to me. “You got back up today,” Carina praised, brushing my hair back. “It’s easy to focus on the fall, but it’s the rising that matters, Callalie.”
I’d rolled my eyes at her.
Tears stream down my cheeks, splashing onto the tile floor. I can’t contain the sobs that crawl out of the crevice in my chest that’s shaped like my sister.
Carina stared at me in the bed for a long moment. She lingered because she knew this would be the last time she saw me in this life. She’d accepted it then, when I still haven’t.
My sister told me, “I love you more than all the stars in the sky, Cal.”
And gods, how she loved them all. She knew the names other people had given them and any she didn’t know, she’d named herself.
“I love you back,” I’d groused, finally sitting up to hug her.
Thank the gods I’d hugged her.
I’d give anything to be able to do it now.
My feet carry me into the room.
I reach a hand toward the back of Carina’s head, but it slips right through. No matter how real I want this to be or how much I want to go back to this moment and stop her, to warn her of what will happen if she goes forward, I can’t.
“We shouldn’t have stopped here,” I croak to Aymes.
August nods from the doorway. He’d already worked it out. The gods’ cruel little game of distraction, and one we should have sprinted right through. Pausing this long might have cost us the win and our lives, but he didn’t want to rip me away from my sister again.
Carina stood and told me goodbye. She didn’t say that she’d check on me later or mention when she’d be home. My sister walked across the room and straight through August.
I should have known something was up when she didn’t say those things. She always said them. Always looked ahead to the next moment.
Outside, the sun violently shifted and shadows fell until the first stars winked through the window.
A pan clanged.
A keening wail came from the kitchen.
“Abuela?” I yelled from the bed, throwing back the covers and swinging my legs around.
When she didn’t answer, I remembered fearing the worst. That she was sick or had a heart attack or stroke.
Younger me rushed to don her repurposed leg, grabbed the crutches to steady herself, stood, and when her sleeve sank into the socket, she hurried to the kitchen.
We go with her.
Abuela was lying on the floor. A trembling hand covered her mouth and sobs wracked her frail body.
“Abuela, what is it?” I couldn’t crouch yet, so I just hovered beside her. “Please tell me what to do! What’s wrong?”
She pointed a knotted finger toward the telecaster.
August curses and catches me when I sway.
My sister’s beaten, bloody body filled the screen. Ares’s dark power held her to the outer stucco wall of The Parthenon Press building. With every painful breath, Carina painted it red.
She screamed as he grabbed her tongue and drew his blade across it, sawing before holding it up for her and everyone else to see. She choked on her own blood. It sprayed and burbled from her mouth as she tried not to drown in it.
He staked her tongue to the wall beside her head with the blade he carved it out with.
She stared into the camera – stared at me with swollen, bruised eyes, her mouth a thick, crimson waterfall – and shook her head.
Crutches clattered to the tile.
“I’m going after her,” I told Abuela, barely able to feel my hands and feet. Our grandmother was in shock.
She was in shock, and I was too, but Carina was still alive. She was alive and she needed me. “Cillian will be here soon. Stay right here. I’m going to get Carina.”
I turned and ran, pushing my way out the door, through the courtyard, and down the dirt road.
“Every time I fell on the way to Olympus, I got back up. For her,” I tell August as he watches the telecaster.
I hadn’t seen this part. I was running to try to stop Ares from killing her, when it was me he really wanted dead.
Carina was still alive when he drove a golden spear through her ribs.
A wail tears out of my chest and bile stings the back of my throat.
“She died before I got there.” My palms and knees were bloody from where I’d fallen and fallen and fallen again.
“My brother was working on a temple – the same one he’s helping to build now – and a friend recognized Carina and ran to tell him about it.
He reached her before I did. He took her down.
I… I didn’t know Ares had used a golden spear. ”
I try to break the offending spear over the kitchen table, striking the earth instead. “I didn’t know.” Slam. “It was a golden.” Slam. “Fucking.” Slam. “Gods damned.” Slam. “Spear!” I scream, spittle flying.
I hurl the gods damned thing through the window. The glass doesn’t shatter because it’s not fucking real. It’s not real. None of this is.
“What does this have to do with a trial? What competition is this?” I rage at the sky.
I stare at my broken, grieving, shocked grandmother and watch a piece of her die, too.
August moves in front of me, steadying me with gentle hands on my shoulders. “Your abuela is safe. Right?”
“Right,” I croak.
Abuela and Cillian are safe. And Carina is in the earth. Buried sitting up in a small burnt soil hole with a mound of rocks to mark the spot. Just outside, in the corner of the garden.
I push away from him and walk through the wall to where the golden spear lays on the scorched ground and pick it up. He doesn’t ask what I’m going to do with it. His eyes tell me that he knows.
I will do what I must now. What I should have done then.
I want the gods of Olympus to choke on those words. I want to kill Ares like my sister promised I would.
An enormous flock of quetzals swoops through Abuela’s garden before flying south. The song they sing isn’t pleasant. Their cadence matches the beat of the war drum that is my heart. And in their cries, I hear my mother’s voice.
“Run, Callalie Ryan. Run!”
These are not my grandmother’s birds. These are Mamá’s.
I grab August’s hand. “Follow the birds!”
“Why?”
I glance at him as we run through the yard, across the courtyard, and into the desert night. “Please trust me.”